Les bases neurologiques de la conscience

On the theme of neural correlates of consciousness, Claire Sergent presents a synthesis of recent advances obtained within the large French team (Collège de France, CNRS, Paris-Descartes University, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Institut du cerveau) which, since Jean-Pierre Changeux, passing by Stanislas Dehaene and Lionel Naccache, with their collaborators, was interested in the running of the human brain. Using modern medical imaging techniques and for certain experiments those of electroencephalography, ClaireSergent shows how we have been able to highlight, to characterize qualitatively and quantitatively, the differences in brain activations between conscious perceptual processes and unconscious perceptual processes. She continues by indicating the interpretations given to these results, in the form of an awareness model involving the activation and reactivation of a global workspace in contact with several areas of the brain that have no direct contact with each other. She ends by showing what contributions these advances canmake in the context of the diagnosis of conscious states in human clinic. In her conclusion, she affirms that the research to come will make it possible to explore the opposite path from the one followed so far, and therefore “to start from the brain activity to go towards the subjective experience” of the individual.